It’s beyond tasteless and would be indefensible if it
weren’t so disgustingly, chokingly funny.

Sacha Baron Cohen plays Admiral General Aladeen, a Qaddafi-like North African dictator who comes to New York to address the
U.N., gets abducted by a would-be assassin and somehow winds up
working at a Brooklyn food co-op.

My guess is that the movie won’t gain much traction in
Arabic-speaking countries. But I found the Arab caricatures less
offensive -- because the idiocy is intentional -- than they
typically are in movies with Arab characters (usually
terrorists), like the rotten “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.”

Though both the title and the subject recall “The Great
Dictator,” the 1940 comedy in which Charles Chaplin tried (and
failed) to make Hitler funny, its brainless anarchy is closer to
a much wilder classic about a foreign power: the Marx Brothers’
1933 “Duck Soup,” in which Groucho’s Rufus T. Firefly led the
nation of Freedonia.

Political Acid

“The Dictator” doesn’t quite make it to brainless.
Aladeen’s late speech praising dictatorship -- because, for
example, under it one percent of the population can amass
practically all of a nation’s wealth -- manages to pour on
political acid without corking the lunacy.

The movie is free from the sentimental goo that clots most
big-budget comedies. It’s got the usual love story (the boyish
girl with the unshaved pits is Anna Faris), but at no point does
it sober up and ask you to care -- which is a huge relief.

Still, it’s much gentler than Baron Cohen’s earlier
vehicles, “Borat” and “Bruno” (Larry Charles directed all
three), where the humor is about the humiliation of unsuspecting
patsies. The butt of the jokes in “The Dictator” is mainly the
dictator.

The comedy is largely verbal (though there’s a pretty great
ongoing sight gag involving a severed head). An angry New Yorker
wails, “The police here are such fascists!” and the tyrant
Aladeen agrees: “Yeah -- and not in a good way!”

Giddy State

Naked on the page like that, the line doesn’t crack me up
the way it did in the theater. But then not all the jokes in
“Duck Soup” are brilliant, either. The genius of that movie is
the giddy state it puts you in, so that at a certain point you
can’t stop laughing. Once I started, “The Dictator” had me,
and a couple of times I was helpless.

So was everyone around me. I laughed so hard I even stopped
wanting to kill the man behind me who kept shouting, “Dang,
that’s funny!”

“The Dictator,” from Paramount, is playing across the
U.S. Rating: ***1/2